Engineering for tomorrow!

Engineering For Tomorrow!

by Stephanie Griffith, Oberlin, OHFirst Place (grades 4-6)

As a child growing up in an age often characterized by its large amount of new technology, I have been blessed to enjoy luxuries unknown to the children of my grandparents’ and great grandparents’ time. An example of such a luxury is riding in a car. In fact, a car ride has become so commonplace in my life that I now often take it for granted. In the past, I would have had to walk or ride my bike in order to go to the mall. Now, my mom simply grabs the keys, starts the car, and it seems like we’re there in no time at all. Since no peddling is required to get to the mall, I can now shop as long as I want without worrying about my legs being too tired for the ride back. That’s definitely something to be thankful for!

Even the ride to the mall itself is now filled with tons of cool stuff. Would our parents or grandparents have ever thought of watching movies while going on a trip? Of course not! Now, I can watch my favorite DVD, or listen to my entire CD collection on headphones, so that my mom doesn’t complain about what my favorite music. With awesome stuff like this, who needs to drive! Fortunately for my mom, the cool stuff isn’t only available to car passengers. While driving, my mom can now monitor the outside temperature, get accurate directions at the touch of a button, or see how much fuel she has left in her tank. Although each of these luxuries is different, they all have one thing in common - each was created by the hard work of engineers!

Unfortunately, the age that I have grown up in is also becoming more and more characterized by terror. It’s almost scary to watch the news at night! It seems like car bombs, potential diseases outbreaks, and other bad news is all that they talk about. When things seem scary, I think about all the things that engineers have done for this world already, and just imagine what they might be working on right now to make everyone’s lives better. Fortunately for me, I get to see some of these things first hand through the work of my brother and his wife, who are both electrical engineers working on anti-terrorism technologies.

One thing that my brother has worked on which is very exciting to me is an electromagnetic sensing system to prevent car bomb explosions. This makes me happy, because I know it will save many lives, both overseas and in America. Even though I don’t know what electromagnetics means right now, this motivates me to learn as much as I can, so that someday I can help others by inventing neat stuff. My sister-in-law also works in cool technology, helping to invent new medical imaging devices for battlefield medical treatment. Hopefully, this new invention will help save the lives of tons of soldiers.

I hope by the year 2020 that engineers will develop enough technology to make war a thing of the past. Who knows, maybe they’ll even come up with ways to make enough food, medicine, gas and what ever else people need. Then there will be no need for war, and everyone will have all they need to survive.

Technologies have improved over time and will continue to improve with the help of my brother and sister in-law, as all as all the other engineers in the world. Someday I hope I will be able to help work on these ideals with them. There are plenty of things that the world still needs in order to be a better place, so get to work engineers!